Retinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) images provide crucial insights into the health of the posterior ocular segment. Therefore, the advancement of automated image analysis methods is imperative to equip clinicians and researchers with quantitative data, thereby facilitating informed decision-making. The application of deep learning (DL)-based approaches has gained extensive traction for executing these analysis tasks, demonstrating remarkable performance compared to labor-intensive manual analyses. However, the acquisition of Retinal OCT images often presents challenges stemming from privacy concerns and the resource-intensive labeling procedures, which contradicts the prevailing notion that DL models necessitate substantial data volumes for achieving superior performance. Moreover, limitations in available computational resources constrain the progress of high-performance medical artificial intelligence, particularly in less developed regions and countries. This paper introduces a novel ensemble learning mechanism designed for recognizing retinal diseases under limited resources (e.g., data, computation). The mechanism leverages insights from multiple pre-trained models, facilitating the transfer and adaptation of their knowledge to Retinal OCT images. This approach establishes a robust model even when confronted with limited labeled data, eliminating the need for an extensive array of parameters, as required in learning from scratch. Comprehensive experimentation on real-world datasets demonstrates that the proposed approach can achieve superior performance in recognizing Retinal OCT images, even when dealing with exceedingly restricted labeled datasets. Furthermore, this method obviates the necessity of learning extensive-scale parameters, making it well-suited for deployment in low-resource scenarios.

Prompt treatment for melanoma is crucial. To assist physicians in identifying lesion areas precisely in a quick manner, we propose a novel skin lesion segmentation technique namely SLP-Net, an ultra-lightweight segmentation network based on the spiking neural P(SNP) systems type mechanism. Most existing convolutional neural networks achieve high segmentation accuracy while neglecting the high hardware cost. SLP-Net, on the contrary, has a very small number of parameters and a high computation speed. We design a lightweight multi-scale feature extractor without the usual encoder-decoder structure. Rather than a decoder, a feature adaptation module is designed to replace it and implement multi-scale information decoding. Experiments at the ISIC2018 challenge demonstrate that the proposed model has the highest Acc and DSC among the state-of-the-art methods, while experiments on the PH2 dataset also demonstrate a favorable generalization ability. Finally, we compare the computational complexity as well as the computational speed of the models in experiments, where SLP-Net has the highest overall superiority

Support vector machine (SVM) and neural networks (NN) have strong complementarity. SVM focuses on the inner operation among samples while NN focuses on the operation among the features within samples. Thus, it is promising and attractive to combine SVM and NN, as it may provide a more powerful function than SVM or NN alone. However, current work on combining them lacks true integration. To address this, we propose a sample attention memory network (SAMN) that effectively combines SVM and NN by incorporating sample attention module, class prototypes, and memory block to NN. SVM can be viewed as a sample attention machine. It allows us to add a sample attention module to NN to implement the main function of SVM. Class prototypes are representatives of all classes, which can be viewed as alternatives to support vectors. The memory block is used for the storage and update of class prototypes. Class prototypes and memory block effectively reduce the computational cost of sample attention and make SAMN suitable for multi-classification tasks. Extensive experiments show that SAMN achieves better classification performance than single SVM or single NN with similar parameter sizes, as well as the previous best model for combining SVM and NN. The sample attention mechanism is a flexible module that can be easily deepened and incorporated into neural networks that require it.

The selection of Gaussian kernel parameters plays an important role in the applications of support vector classification (SVC). A commonly used method is the k-fold cross validation with grid search (CV), which is extremely time-consuming because it needs to train a large number of SVC models. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to train SVC and optimize the selection of Gaussian kernel parameters. We first formulate the training and parameter selection of SVC as a minimax optimization problem named as MaxMin-L2-SVC-NCH, in which the minimization problem is an optimization problem of finding the closest points between two normal convex hulls (L2-SVC-NCH) while the maximization problem is an optimization problem of finding the optimal Gaussian kernel parameters. A lower time complexity can be expected in MaxMin-L2-SVC-NCH because CV is not needed. We then propose a projected gradient algorithm (PGA) for training L2-SVC-NCH. The famous sequential minimal optimization (SMO) algorithm is a special case of the PGA. Thus, the PGA can provide more flexibility than the SMO. Furthermore, the solution of the maximization problem is done by a gradient ascent algorithm with dynamic learning rate. The comparative experiments between MaxMin-L2-SVC-NCH and the previous best approaches on public datasets show that MaxMin-L2-SVC-NCH greatly reduces the number of models to be trained while maintaining competitive test accuracy. These findings indicate that MaxMin-L2-SVC-NCH is a better choice for SVC tasks.

According to the World Health Organization, the number of mental disorder patients, especially depression patients, has grown rapidly and become a leading contributor to the global burden of disease. However, the present common practice of depression diagnosis is based on interviews and clinical scales carried out by doctors, which is not only labor-consuming but also time-consuming. One important reason is due to the lack of physiological indicators for mental disorders. With the rising of tools such as data mining and artificial intelligence, using physiological data to explore new possible physiological indicators of mental disorder and creating new applications for mental disorder diagnosis has become a new research hot topic. However, good quality physiological data for mental disorder patients are hard to acquire. We present a multi-modal open dataset for mental-disorder analysis. The dataset includes EEG and audio data from clinically depressed patients and matching normal controls. All our patients were carefully diagnosed and selected by professional psychiatrists in hospitals. The EEG dataset includes not only data collected using traditional 128-electrodes mounted elastic cap, but also a novel wearable 3-electrode EEG collector for pervasive applications. The 128-electrodes EEG signals of 53 subjects were recorded as both in resting state and under stimulation; the 3-electrode EEG signals of 55 subjects were recorded in resting state; the audio data of 52 subjects were recorded during interviewing, reading, and picture description. We encourage other researchers in the field to use it for testing their methods of mental-disorder analysis.

Clustering aims to separate observed data into different categories. The performance of popular clustering models relies on the sample-to-sample similarity. However, the pairwise similarity is prone to be corrupted by noise or outliers and thus deteriorates the subsequent clustering. A high-order relationship among samples-to-samples may elaborate the local manifold of the data and thus provide complementary information to guide the clustering. However, few studies have investigated the connection between high-order similarity and usual pairwise similarity. To fill this gap, we first define a high-order tensor similarity to exploit the samples-to-samples affinity relationship. We then establish the connection between tensor similarity and pairwise similarity, proving that the decomposable tensor similarity is the Kronecker product of the usual pairwise similarity and the non-decomposable tensor similarity is generalized to provide complementary information, which pairwise similarity fails to regard. Finally, the high-order tensor similarity and pairwise similarity (IPS2) were integrated collaboratively to enhance clustering performance by enjoying their merits. The proposed IPS2 is shown to perform superior or competitive to state-of-the-art methods on synthetic and real-world datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrated that tensor similarity is capable to boost the performance of the classical clustering method.

In many real world planning domains, some observation information is optional and useless to the execution of a plan; on the other hand, information acquisition may require some kind of cost. The problem of observation reduction for strong plans has been addressed in the literature. However, observation reduction for plans with contexts (which are more general and useful than strong plans in robotics) is still a open problem. In this paper, we present an attempt to solve the problem. Our first contribution is the definition of structured plans, which can encode sequential, conditional and iterative behaviors, and is expressive enough for dealing with incomplete observation information and internal states of the agent. A second contribution is an observation reduction algorithm for plans with contexts, which can transform a plan with contexts into a structured plan that only branches on necessary observation information.

In many real world planning domains, some observation information is optional and useless to the execution of a plan; on the other hand, information acquisition may require some kind of cost. The problem of observation reduction for strong plans has been addressed in the literature. However, observation reduction for plans with contexts (which are more general and useful than strong plans in robotics) is still a open problem. In this paper, we present an attempt to solve the problem. Our first contribution is the definition of structured plans, which can encode sequential, conditional and iterative behaviors, and is expressive enough for dealing with incomplete observation information and internal states of the agent. A second contribution is an observation reduction algorithm for plans with contexts, which can transform a plan with contexts into a structured plan that only branches on necessary observation information.

In many real world planning domains, some observation information is optional and useless to the execution of a plan; on the other hand, information acquisition may require some kind of cost. The problem of observation reduction for strong plans has been addressed in the literature. However, observation reduction for plans with contexts (which are more general and useful than strong plans in robotics) is still a open problem. In this paper, we present an attempt to solve the problem. Our first contribution is the definition of structured plans, which can encode sequential, conditional and iterative behaviors, and is expressive enough for dealing with incomplete observation information and internal states of the agent. A second contribution is an observation reduction algorithm for plans with contexts, which can transform a plan with contexts into a structured plan that only branches on necessary observation information.

In many real world planning domains, some observation information is optional and useless to the execution of a plan; on the other hand, information acquisition may require some kind of cost. The problem of observation reduction for strong plans has been addressed in the literature. However, observation reduction for plans with contexts (which are more general and useful than strong plans in robotics) is still a open problem. In this paper, we present an attempt to solve the problem. Our first contribution is the definition of structured plans, which can encode sequential, conditional and iterative behaviors, and is expressive enough for dealing with incomplete observation information and internal states of the agent. A second contribution is an observation reduction algorithm for plans with contexts, which can transform a plan with contexts into a structured plan that only branches on necessary observation information.